BREAKINGVIEWS-The Week in Breakingviews: What we learned in 2025

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Peter Thal Larsen

LONDON, Dec 21 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Welcome back! At Breakingviews we prefer to look forward rather than back. But in this edition, the last of 2025, I’ll recap some of the key insights from the past 12 months. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a peaceful festive season and a happy, healthy new year. (If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here to get it directly in your inbox in future.)

OPENING LINE

“When U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, he was probably not thinking of corporate governance battles in South Korea.”

Read more: US minerals quest steps into Korea governance mess.

TEN THINGS I LEARNED FROM BREAKINGVIEWS THIS YEAR

1. China built more commercial ships by tonnage last year than the U.S. has completed since World War Two.

2. Stablecoin operator Tether paid dividends of $7.4 billion in the first half of 2025, almost as much as JPMorgan.

3. Fewer than a million luxury shoppers account for 23% of the industry’s global sales.

4. Large Wall Street banks’ trading assets have risen by 30% since 2022, but their reported value at risk has fallen 15%.

5. The total value of rare earths sold worldwide last year was just $3.5 billion.

6. The median private equity-backed company has been held by its current owner for more than six years.

7. Nine of California’s ten worst fires since 1932 have occurred in the past decade.

8. German tank maker Rheinmetall has an order backlog equivalent to five years’ revenue.

9. Ethiopia received more U.S. foreign aid in 2023 than it paid in interest on its debt.

10. Remy Cointreau’s shares are worth less than the value of the cognac in its vaults.

CREDITS AND DEBITS

Breakingviews tradition dictates that the festive season is a time to look ahead. That’s when our columnists publish their predictions for the coming 12 months. This year is no different: you can admire our prognostications for 2026 as we unwrap them here. I’ll pick out some highlights in January. But as this is the final edition of The Week in Breakingviews, it’s time to reflect on some of the lessons we learned in 2025.

The first takeaway is the extraordinary resilience of global commerce and finance in the face of political turmoil. U.S. President Donald Trump delivered the tariff shock that many had assumed was just a negotiating ploy, took a chainsaw to Washington’s bureaucracy, alienated close allies, and attacked the Federal Reserve. Yet economies mostly kept growing, and financial markets quickly recovered from the April selloff. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds is lower than at the time of Trump’s re-election in November 2024. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 Index has gained a healthy 15% this year; benchmark stock market indices in Hong Kong, Milan, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and even London are up more than 20%. Only the price of gold (up 65%) and the dollar (down 9% against a basket of other currencies) offer clues that something has shifted.

This durability owes a huge debt to artificial intelligence. The extraordinary global scramble to build data centres, snap up graphics chips, hire AI researchers, and secure the power required to train and run large language models has been the dominant driver of activity and optimism. Yet for many companies the commercial benefits of applying AI are limited, as this Reuters analysis makes clear. A huge amount depends on the returns on those vast investments becoming apparent in 2026. Indeed, more than half of markets professionals surveyed by Deutsche Bank strategists identify AI disillusionment as the top risk for the coming year.

The third insight is that few of the global problems have been definitively resolved. Though a ceasefire in Gaza is welcome, an end to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine remains elusive. Trump’s trade policies are in permanent flux, even with countries like the United Kingdom that struck trade deals with the president. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to deliver its verdict on his emergency tariffs in the coming months. U.S.-China relations are constantly changing, as demonstrated by on-off restrictions on exports of Nvidia chips.

A final theme is that dealmaking has made a big comeback. It was the second-busiest year on record for mergers and acquisitions, according to LSEG data: only the post-Covid rebound of 2021 produced more transactions by dollar value. Big deals dominated: mergers over $10 billion almost trebled. The majority were between U.S. companies in similar industries, such as movies and television, trains, consumer goods, and payments. Yet here too, signs of exuberance are creeping in. How else to explain Saudi Arabia’s $55 billion buyout of computer-game giant Electronic Arts? If interest rates remain low and markets stay high, this may just be the start.

CHART OF THE WEEK

This chart sums up one of the most significant events of the past year: the dramatic increase in U.S. tariffs on imports, reversing decades of easier trade barriers. Yet it also poses something of a macroeconomic mystery. As Gabriel Rubin writes, the recession predicted by many economists did not materialize. For what it’s worth, the consensus is for strong U.S. growth in 2026.

THE WEEK IN PODCASTS

Private equity firms spent much of 2025 grappling with the backlog of investments that they made a few years ago and are now struggling to shift. For The Big View, Jonathan Guilford talked to Seth Boro, managing partner of Thoma Bravo, about the liquidity crunch and impact of artificial intelligence.

One of the economic surprises of 2025 was China’s robust trade surplus, which topped $1 trillion in the first 11 months of the year. In the Viewsroom, Aimee Donnellan and Una Galani were joined by Robyn Mak and Ka Sing Chan to debate whether the People’s Republic’s push into high-end tech goods can keep going.

PARTING SHOT

In a year characterised by broken political norms, wild claims about technology, and financial exuberance, it was perhaps inevitable that all three would unite in a deal involving Donald Trump. That transaction arrived on Thursday, as the president’s social media venture, Trump Media & Technology, announced a merger with TAE Technologies, a startup developing nuclear fusion.

As Rob Cyran writes, the whole thing is a microcosm of how finance has detached from reality. Trump Media, which reported revenue of $3 million in the first nine months of the year, has a market value of $4 billion, inflated by its association with the White House. Details of the merger are minimal, and executives did not answer questions on a call with investors. TAE hopes to deliver fusion technology, which scientists have been promising for seven decades, by 2031. If that doesn’t work, TAE is also working on a cancer treatment. This is one festive gift investors can leave unwrapped.

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Follow Peter Thal Larsen on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

(Editing by Liam Proud; Production by Oliver Taslic)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on LARSEN/peter.thal.larsen@thomsonreuters.com))